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Community Spotlight: Boof69

Did you know the Liftoff community is run by its members? In this community spotlight we are happy to tell you about Boof69, an enthusiastic community members who has spend hundreds of hours of his free time moderating the Liftoff forums and helping other community members.

Boof69, moderator of the Liftoff forums, who is the man behind the nickname?

My real name is Scott and I am an avid quadcopter pilot and RC hobbyist among other hobbies like music and art . I also have a background in 3D modeling and have many successful models in a popular radio control simulator. I would have to say I become obsessed with new things and Liftoff is no exception. At this time I have more than 550 hrs dedicated to this sim and I am honored to be a moderator for it’s forum.

How did you become moderator of the Liftoff forums?

As I said I get obsessed with things and I enjoyed Liftoff so much that I found myself trying to field as many questions as I could to help the Liftoff community. I suppose that drew the attention of the developers. I was approached by Kevin Haelterman and asked if I would like to moderate. I happily accepted and it has been a great experience since then.

From a moderator perspective, whats your view on the Liftoff community?

From my experience in the forum most of the community seems excited about the direction Liftoff is taking. Most seem eager to offer suggestions to help with features and the overall quality of the finished simulator/game, Also to help one another with issues they may be having. Many forum posters have a lot of real world knowledge.

We know you like to do freestyle more than racing, what’s your favorite environment and track for freestyle flying?

I would have to say that the Autumn Fields map is my favorite as it is the kind of environment I mostly find myself flying in real life. As for the track that would have to be the one I mashed together from the practice field JohnsonFPV created and a small race course another contributor made. I named it Autumn Quadrant because it uses just one quarter of the map and it has “Quad” in the title. That track has taught me so much about proximity flying and it has helped impact every aspect of it.

If there’s one feature you definitely want to see in a future update, what would it be?

That would have to be voice chat in multiplayer especially freestyle. I feel it would go a long way to help teach people new to quadcopters about the finer points of flying. With spectator mode already added I feel that is the last piece of the puzzle toward that goal.

Thats a great suggestion, it’s something we would love to do in a future update.

In a word “Flow”. When I first started I tried to force my flying into patterns or routes. This meant that If I over or under rotate, (which is not hard to do), I would not be set up for that next expected maneuver. Now If If I exit a rotation degrees out of where I expected to be I do not react on the sticks. Instead I modify my route and try to smoothly transition to the next trick. This is heavily influenced by the music I have playing in my headset. I also thing of different types of athletics and try to mimic them in my flying. For example I may be thinking of Parkour so I will use a trick like the Kong Vault so I will fly close and over an object and flick downwards to keep it in view for a beat then back to level and repeat on another object.

I also use what I call “Spotting”. I will look at one point such as a leaf or the corner of a container and fly around it keeping it centered in view and using peripheral vision to avoid crashing into things around it.

Our favorite question: if Liftoff were real life, how much money would the hours of flying (or crashing) have cost you?

Wow! It’s hard to say, but if I broke nothing but props during these crashes it would be close to $1000. I have crashed very hard so many times in Liftoff and that would have translated into major damage in real life. Considering the cost and fragility of the electronics aboard race and freestyle quads the cost could be close to $5000 maybe more.

You get one Tweet’s worth of characters (140 characters) to do some self promotion. Go!

Check out my 3D modeling tutorials and Liftoff videos at My Youtube Channel and some of my RealFlight models HERE. If you like my flight videos on the liftoff videos page rate them up and leave a comment.